Off in Dream World...

Mel loves words. You all know this about me, right? I'm a sucker for a well-turned phrase, an amusing anecdote, a romantic couplet, a brilliant comeback, or a delicious line in a movie or book. I keep a small little journal of my favorite movie lines and quotes so that I can whip them out at any minute for inspiration. Hey, you never know! And when it comes to music, I can't just listen to the words of a song. Actually, I prefer to read the lyrics completely first just to make sure I have captured the essence of a song BEFORE I hear it.

I'm a longtime AWAD [A.Word.A.Day] subscriber. Every weekday morning there is a gift waiting for me in my email inbox at work, a new word to chew over. It's wonderful. My favorite word this week is "doolally."

I'm an editor by nature. I can't leave things well enough alone. I have to tweak each line and attempt to get the phrase perfected before I can move on. Trust me, the editor in me has completely revised this posting at least twice already, and I'm not done yet.

I keep post-its with me all the time to jot down ideas, a phrase to blog about or something silly someone told me. Words are my life! I enjoy them, they enthrall me, and I tend to obsess about them.

Now, I don't know if you all remember having to diagram sentences in school, but it's something I recall. Subject on the left, verb on the right with a straight line dividing them... It wasn't my favorite part of English class, but I didn't really dread it either. I certainly haven't thought about it in ages, and yet somehow it has been haunting me.

The other night I woke up from a dream in a cold sweat. I was completely in a panic and glad to find myself tucked away in my bed and that it was all just a dream. Why you may ask? Well, because I was obviously having a terrible nightmare in which I had no memory of how to diagram a particular sentence. Horror of horrors, right? I mean, can you imagine the embarrassment that I was feeling and the relief that it was just a dream?

This was a first for me, not that I couldn't diagram a sentence, but that I was dreaming about it. I mean why can't I dream about falling or flying or something everyone else dreams about? Why was I dreaming about forgetting how to diagram sentences correctly? Most of my dreams are insane or rather incoherent. That's nothing new, but usually when I wake myself up in a panic it's because I'm afraid I'm being attacked by a spider the size of a bear or that I slept through light bell or was late for chapel and was going to get demerits. [OK, so most of my nightmares have to do with spiders or Bob Jones University. Well, apparently, BJU left quite a mark on my psyche because I have a dream like that at least once a month. HA! Hmmmm...what could it mean. OK, don't overanalyze it, Mel! Just let it go.]

So ever since my diagramming dream, I've been trying to recall all the rules for it just so that I'd be ready for my next nightmare. I googled "diagramming sentences" this morning, and some of it came back to mind pretty quickly. So it wasn't completely lost from my memory. But then I found this link, which made me laugh. It is a sentence diagram of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. You can also find the rest of the U.S. Constitution diagrammed for you as well as the Declaration of Independence, President Lincoln's Gettysburg address, etc. WOW! Feel free to check it out but not if you are afraid of having a bad dream. HA!